Editorials

The Twitterverse has been aflame all week with outraged tweeters denouncing the editorial which was scheduled to be published in Sunday's New York Times print issue (March 20).

Let’s detour for a brief pre-rant. The on-line version of the essay appeared sometime mid-week, with comments allowed, which is not always the case. The number of comments posted, chosen by moderators from reader submissions, is close to the 3,000 mark. A somewhat cursory scan doesn’t find even twenty comments that endorse what was said by the New York Times Editorial Board, whose hallowed byline the piece carries. And yet, well before the print paper had been delivered to subscribers in California like me, the comments were closed, so print readers can’t comment online. This happens frequently, and it’s annoying.

But what about the substance of the complaints that did make it online?

Let’s start with the online headline:

America Has a Free Speech Problem.
 

This refers to a tricky little bit of virtual showmanship, wherein readers are asked to register their opinion on a sequence of questions, and then—snap!—their answer is compared to the opinions of people of a variety of persuasions and attributes who took part in a poll commissioned by the Times. As more than one commenter pointed out, the form of the chosen questions presupposed the answer—there was no way that the subject’s answer could simply be “this is hogwash”. The questionnaire effectively asked “How do you feel about the problem?”, not “Is there any problem?” This is a well-known fault of surveys like this one, asking leading questions to achieve an expected answer.

And then there’s the first sentence, called out in many comments:  

“For all the tolerance and enlightenment that modern society claims, Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.”

Huh? When, for heaven’s sake, have we ever had the “right” to say whatever we want “without fear of being shamed or shunned?”This is so ridiculous that it was difficult for me and others to read any further, as the rest of the piece lapsed into muzzy censoriousness with little internal cohesion.  

One outraged tweeter, identifying himself as a former NYT employee as I remember, led with the demand that the whole New York Times Editorial Board be fired. That draconian tweet seems to have vanished, or at least I can’t find it, so I can’t attribute it.  

Here I must confess my complete ineptness with social media. I have more to read in print than I can consume as it is, and when snarky remarks flash across my screen in Twitter.com I can’t find them again when I want to quote.  

On the bright side, looking for the author of that outraged opinion, I scrolled through a good number of interesting uncensored comments on the topic of free speech which I might otherwise have missed. This led me to compare and contrast the open-sesame rules for participating in Twitter.com with these smarmy and constricted rules of engagement for New York Times comments:  

“To be approved for publication, your comments should be civil and reflect The New York Times’s standards for taste present on NYTimes.com and in The New York Times newspaper. A few things we won't tolerate: name-calling, personal attacks, obscenity, vulgarity, profanity (including expletives and letters followed by dashes), commercial promotion, impersonations, incoherence, and SHOUTING.”  

Damn! This seems self-righteously smug when compared to the rest of the internet commentariat. It’s not suppression of any constitutional guarantee of free speech, but it certainly amounts to shaming and shunning intemperate correspondents when compared to a lot of the candid expression of opinion which can be readily found elsewhere.  

Example: what if I were to include, in a comment on the Times editorial, a quote usually attributed to Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black? He was known to carry a copy of the U.S. Constitution in his back pocket, which he would on occasion pull out to declaim the First Amendment thusly: “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech. That means NO LAW!”  

The traditional capitalization here represents SHOUTING. Would the august NYT tolerate that in its comments? If not, why not?  

The key distinction is that NO LAW means just that, no LAW. It’s laws that the First Amendment refers to, as many of us used to learn in high school civics classes. And yet, any non-governmental publication, including the New York Times, has a perfect right to publish only what in-house censors think is nice (“civil”) according to “The New York Times’s standards for taste present on NYTimes.com and in The New York Times newspaper.”  

How about name-calling and personal attacks?  

“The mayor is a pig-headed jerk.”  

“Mayor Adams is a pig-headed jerk.”  

“The Mayor of Berkeley is a pig-headed jerk.”  

Would any of these pass muster? Even if they’re all true and not obscene?  

How about “Putin is a pig-headed jerk”? Few NYT readers would object to that one.  

What the Editorial Board appears to be trying to do with their editorial is to address the “problem” of what’s been called “cancel culture”. Again, I must confess to being out of touch. At a family gathering a while ago my granddaughters asked me what I thought of cancel culture, and they had to explain to me what it is.  

When I understood what we were talking about, I couldn’t get too upset. Yes, “shaming and shunning” describes the practice, but what’s wrong with that? People say stupid things all the time. There’s no reason to let them get away with it unchallenged. Shame and shun away, I say.  

As many clever tweeters discussed at enormous length, before cancelling was a thing an old remedy for perceived insults was duels. The young, fans as they are of the musical Hamilton, should agree that the show’s hero’s death in a duel was much worse than any amount of shaming or shunning would have been. (Another hero who died in a duel that they might not know, but should, is Alexander Pushkin, one of the major world authors of African descent. And there are more.)  

The simplest defense against verbal abuse can be found in the traditional comeback kids learn to bolster their self confidence when they are confronted by pig-headed jerks who speak from their [clouded] minds and voice [offensive] opinions: Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.  

For supposed grown-ups discussing serious topics it’s more complicated. The Berkeley Daily Planet has always been open to all kinds of opinions, especially now that it’s almost all opinions all the time. We have generally avoided the kind of distasteful comment that the NYT decries by the simple expedient of requiring writers to use their own names if they want their opinions posted. I personally have very little interest in the opinion of people who want to hide their identity behind pseudonyms, and as a non-governmental entity I’m entitled to draw that line. It keeps out the riffraff.  

Long ago, when the paper was still in print, we published a signed op-ed from an Iranian student critical of Israel’s relationship to Palestine. Public opinion on the topic has shifted somewhat since then, but it’s still the proverbial third rail. Those who were offended by the author’s views devoted a great deal of time, money and hot air to trying to shut the paper down, with some success.  

That experience—quintessential shaming and shunning by critics urging the paper's advertisers to engage in classic boycotting —was a serious pain, but it was their right, and a lot better than a duel would have been, wasn’t it? I think so. And in the end, no harm was done.